I’m Learning To Dance With Eclipses

I’m learning to dance with eclipses
and the outmoded ecologies of the sword-rattling windows
weeping rivers of acid rain that hang
like the ragged lace of abandoned curtains
or the tentacles of protozoic jellyfish. My life
is a rock too hard to sweet-talk the larks and swallows,
and the wolf that came once a week
to teach me to sing underwater grew old
and died like the piano he was buried in at sea.
I don’t know what I want from the walls
I’ve designated heritage battlefields
with an array of awards and degrees
and the pitted impacts of meteor-coloured earwigs,
but everything I ask for seems to make
terrorists of the lamps
and the single moth
knocking himself out trying to crash into flames
against the vanilla fez of the shade
is two fanatics shy of immolation. What does it matter
my eyes have congealed into a still-life
with antique ax-handles, a menagerie
of scarred paint, the landscape of the moon
humped and bubbled in contaminated crimson,
I haven’t seen anything for disposable eras
I wanted to drink from a skull. While the shadows and ashes
discuss what they have in common, hoping
for a marriage of convenience,
the blue night sifts my constellations through a spider-web
looking for the penumbral tear of the last life I shed
longing to avoid this one
like black shoe-polish on the pillowcase of a swan.
Even the absurdities have looped into platitudes
and petty thieves have stolen
the mask of the mouth in the imperial mirror
that keeps telling me
I’m the slumlord of my own ambition,
the blighted rind of the moon withering in the garbage,
the sloughed skin of a serpentine condom full of stars.
And how am I to understand my loneliness
and the fools I deploy to deface it
except as one more yearning octopus
with arms like hollyhocks
trying to cross the highway without a line of credit?
I should be bolder, smarter, more mineral
than light, my bones recast in gunsmith plastic,
and my heart a leaking hand grenade, white phosphorus,
unpinned and ready to hurl like a violent dove
through the slutty dreamcatchers in the windows
of strategic brothels, I should stand up
to the apostrophes of Armageddon
and handcuff my voice to a pair of quotation marks
and send all my friends bouquets of radical placards
until my voice is released from isolation, my blood
from intensive care, my mind from death row,
and I’m paid all the back wages I’m owed for the use of my innocence.
When the wind decides to defeat the leaves with poison
and the charcoal women burn their tongues
like meat on the grill of their dinner-bell smiles,
their charms all smoke and cocktail tears,
I should have the metal to dropp
depth-charges on the willow cruising the shadows for convoys,
and depose the cult of scorpions marching south
that tried to brainwash me into believing
I’ve aged like wounded shoes.